Some documents posted in a public place or the like have a role of providing information to visitors in addition to providing information to nearby residents. Documents posted in Japan are usually written in Japanese and people who do not comprehend Japanese cannot obtain information from the documents. Sign boards in tourist sites or the like are sometimes written in English alongside Japanese, but not all comprehend English. Writing in every language would be ideal but is not practical due to the issues of posting space and translation cost.
A possible solution has been proposed in which a two-dimensional code is printed on a posted document and a translation of the document is provided with the use of a cellular phone or other information terminal devices that have a function of decoding two-dimensional codes. Patent Literature 1, for example, describes an idea of displaying a two-dimensional code in a document and using the two-dimensional code to obtain a document that is a translation of the displayed document from the Internet in the form of texts or voice. The translation is in a plurality of languages from which a user can choose. However, Patent Literature 1 does not disclose concrete means for realizing the idea.
Patent Literature 2 describes an invention in which text information written in a document is translated into another language as translated text information, which is turned into two-dimensional code information to be displayed as a two-dimensional code alongside the document, and the two-dimensional code is converted into the translated text information and reproduced as voice information by a cellular phone.
Patent Literature 3 discloses an invention in which a two-dimensional code for accessing an electronic document that is stored in an external server is printed in a paper document, and an information specifying device accesses the electronic document with the use of the two-dimensional code, and specifies word information from the electronic document. In this invention, the information specifying device asks an external translation sever to execute processing of translating one sentence that includes the specified word, thereby making a translation, and the result of the translation is displayed on the information specifying device.